The folks who are saying 8gb is not enough are still stuck in the intel model and android model of structure. The mac is now like the iPhone. iPhone needs Less ram to perform tasks that an android needs more ram to perform. This is why for most people who were fine with 16gb on intel would be fine with 8 on m1 and those who needed 32gb on intel MacBook pros are fine with 16gb
it’s a paradigm shift
The iOS/ipadOS app/memory management models are different in really significant ways from macos. So no, there's no obvious reason (that I'm aware of) that less memory is optimal on the M1 macs compared to intel macs. Certainly not because ios and macos have some similarities. iOS is much more strict about what requirements apps should adhere to and the OS will actively kill/quit apps when it needs memory. The iOS model is much more explicit that users should not need to quit - let the OS handle it. (Related to that is the explicit permissions structure about using resources when apps not open - somewhat related to the 'multitasking exists but priority to the active app, get in the way and we'll shut you down.).
The 'browse apps' function in iOS that users think means 'apps that are open' isn't exactly accurate - they may be nothing more than a placeholder but actually be moved (mostly) out of memory.
As I understand it (or best I can explain it), the big difference is that it is inherent to iOS that apps should always be in a "kill-able" state and ready to restart back to where they left off, and that all of the info needed to do so may be ejected from ram at any time. (A bit simplistic because there are procedures to warn the app to free up resources and do some handling if needed - but if they don't, they'll still be kicked out). In this paradigm, the ideal is that what I've called "kill-able" is probably more akin to an app-level sleep mode ("be ready to wake up back to previous state quickly"). Obviously in macos apps can do some of this on their own (like re-opening closed documents or web pages), but they're mostly not forced to.
But: even if Big Sur brought in more of this (not sure about that), this is NOT unique to the M1s.
Or bluntly: if people think they can 'get by' with less RAM in M1 macs, there's no new paradigm - probably what they are perceiving is that the system is much faster overall and there's less of a penalty (compared to what they were using before) to running out of memory.
An analogy: in hard drive days, the 'best' advice to speed things up (all else equal) was 'more RAM' - going to hard drive for swap etc was SO much slower, the penalty for running out of memory was enormous. And of course there were core functions like starting up and loading info from 'disk', launching new programs, etc, that 'more RAM' didn't help. (Moving from a slow HDD to a faster one barely helped, but it did help)
When SSDs became available/widely used, the relative benefits changed. Ballpark SSDs are perhaps 100X faster than HDDs (latency actually more improved than data transfer, writes less so than reads, so a simplification). Now the heuristic became "if you're still running an HDD as your system disk - switch to an SSD. After you've done that, upgrade your ram."
SSDs changed the hit from going to swap (dramatically), and they also sped up things that more RAM didn't help as much as it used to (booting, launching, reading in data for first time, etc). On an HDD system, active swapping meant a HUGE performance penalty, possibly making your system unusable - and I've lived that. Switching to an SSD meant your (e.g. 4gb) system now magically had 'enough' ram, whereas with HDD you really really needed 8 or 12gb or your system would choke and die from time to time. But the truth was, the upgrade to 8 or 12gb was still a good idea - only the cost/benefit trade-off of more ram changed a lot. (Demanding users would absolutely switch to an SSD
and upgrade the ram.)
How this relates to the M1s: everything is faster. Bottlenecks less significant. Penalty to going to swap is less significant (not order of magnitude better, but significant). Other benefits / improvements make these penalties less noticeable.
In other words: if you're coming from an HDD system, everything on the M1 seems magical. It doesn't mean there's no penalty from swap, just much, much less. Probably so much better you don't even notice you're occasionally a bit short of ram. If you're coming from a 'normal' SSD system that's a bit older (slower SSD and ram), maybe five years old, you also might not notice - or only infrequently and decide you can live with it.
That's fine: if you like it, you like it, don't want to pay more because 'fast enough', that's your call. (I suspect you may notice in a few years, but again - your decision, and it's still an improvement).
But NONE OF THAT means or implies that M1 magically uses less memory. You just aren't noticing it - probably because everything so much better, it seems to you like it uses less memory.
Many users may never care and the benefit from more memory too small. That's their call. My 4gb airbook is fine for light use - but can choke and die quickly when memory gets tight. I know from desktop use 8gb was manageable some of the time, 16gb is very good, but 24 or 32 gb is better - noticeably so (24 to 32 is much less noticeable though). (Mind on the desktop going from 16gb to 32 recently was only about a hundred bucks, so a no-brainer for me in terms of cost.)
For me, I'll splurge the $200 to go to 16gb, and it will really be worth it. Everyone else can make their own decision.
